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If you notice, some animals just look like they are floating around places, since they are literally just one sprite with no individual parts. Maybe this can be tweaked so that each foot moves separately and gets bloody when it gets stabbed or shot, or just goes flying off.

As for colonists, maybe they should be doing stuff with their hands? For example, a pickaxe's swinging motion should be in sync with the actual mining task, and colonists should be doing things with their hands based on what they are holding. It would make the colonists' movements more dynamic and meaningful rather than just a status and a little particle effect.

EDIT: To clarify, that doesn't mean to add legs, I like when colonists look like they're floating their way to their destination. Just hands and other objects connected to the colonist.

As you know, the forums have some publicly available statistics. I made it into a graph:



Red markers indicate releases, small red markers indicate bugfix releases. The orange/red star marks when Tynan launched the pre-alpha.

The great thing about SMF is that almost any page on this website can be accessed and looked at in two different ways. In other words, I can get the raw daily forum statistics by simply requesting the year and month and appending ;xml to the URL. (Example) All I did was just batch download every "populated" month, import it to Excel as an XML table, and graph it. That's really all there is to it! Only thing that I haven't gotten working is a "total members" column. It's not as important, but you can make a trendline off of it.

Pretty cool, eh?

Everything's going well in my colony... until day 65.

First, my farmer loses several IQ points and only harvests potatoes instead of growing them as well. So I set it to priority 2. Then he starts growing again.

Then Cassandra (playing in casual mode here) trolls me and causes a blight. So much for that... now my colonists are starving (due to aforementioned lack of intelligence). And in a day, my colony goes from six to three, because they don't even bother to hunt.

Some days pass with 3 colonists. They grow crops, and they're not starving because I set orders to "butcher corpses". Oh yeah, guess what happens next? Another blight. Okay, great. I have plenty of human meat in my reserves.

The following day, Cassandra responds with an AI core crash landing, just to spite me. My colonists start to become mad, and my prisoner breaks out of his cell. So I decide to storm the core because I have little to lose. Luckily, there's just a scyther, which is easy to kill when you have a colonist with a charge rifle and another with grenades. Bad news: the scyther kills the guy with the Lee-Enfield rifle, and the guy with the grenades kills the guy with the charge rifle.

After my sole colonist angrily destroys the AI core, he returns home. And then when he's about to go to bed, he decides that it's best to go in a rampage. Because hey, going in a rampage is better than sleeping, right?

When/where/how did you come to hear about RimWorld for the first time?

For me, I heard about RimWorld from Scott Manley, who occasionally plays obscure sci-fi indie games.

(Poll: http://strawpoll.me/2358724)

I think that releases are being focused too much on addition to the point that it's getting hard to play the game correctly. I think we should have more updates like Alpha 3, where it's an update just for fixing bugs, balancing the game, and improving the framework of the game.

Production needs to slow down a bit, make everything stable and playable and re-playable. Not just play once, fix any problems, add something new, and play once more. New stuff is always good, but the more new features are added, the more bugs are introduced as they conflict in operation with one another (example: walls overlapping trees).

If Alpha 6 is not enjoyable (it's not for me), I think we need to have a stabilization update for Alpha 7. Sure, new stuff is good. But Alpha 7 should not have factories or multiplayer or anything groundbreaking like that. It should just be fixing. Currently, there are 66 bugs assigned, and many more still to be found or named.

My gripe with Alpha 6 are the centipedes and mechanoids, and the storyteller. Centipedes and mechanoids are too OP, and the storyteller should generate a sort of sine wave, not a sawtooth wave, in terms of the welfare of the colony. For me, the storyteller either goes too easy or too hard on me. (Example: Phoebe Friendly, set to "Casual" difficulty. One incident, they send 2 raiders against me; the next incident, it's an AI core along with a centipede equipped with a minigun.) Plus, the mortar launchers do not consume shells, nor do their accuracy correlate with a colonist's shooting skill, nor do they increase a colonist's shooting skill.

Sorry for the rant, I'm probably going to get flamed, but what are your experiences with Alpha 6? Is it "stable" in your opinion?

Recently, the forum has surpassed the 10,000-member mark. It's also surpassed the 50,000-post mark and the 5,000-topic mark. The community really has grown along with the game.

Let's celebrate!

I wonder if we're going to have this. For me, it's a lot easier just to directly copy and replace old files with new files rather than having to delete the core mod and everything related to the old version. Rather than having RimWorld###.exe and RimWorld###_Data, we would just have RimWorld.exe and RimWorld_Data.

I'd like to trace the causes of a few problems in RimWorld, except I don't have the source, and the closest thing there is is .NET Reflector, which is, like all commercial software, ridiculously expensive. Not only that, but the RimWorld EXE isn't even pure .NET, so I have no idea how to debug. Another thing I could do is use Cheat Engine to print a disassembly, but the other problem is that RimWorld has 30 different threads that can't be stopped simultaneously, and the disassembly doesn't seem to be traceable. Yes, the "solution" is to just approach Tynan, but it's a catch-22, because he's on vacation, and he might not produce a fix until next month, and there may be more people having the same problem. So I'd like to find the problem myself and post the solution.

What do testers here use to look into the game code while the game is running? ILSpy is worthless in this case (but indispensable otherwise) because I have to look at what the game gets stuck doing when the bug happens.

Any PDB files I can use? Unity Player symbols?

There should be a chance of a "general" trader arriving so that players don't have to wait for a specific trader to come around. Basically, the general trader sells a little bit of everything. He doesn't carry so much supply like a dedicated trader, but if a player is desperate for something, like 100 potatoes or 2 or 3 pistols, then the general trader can satisfy those needs. A general trader would only have about 400 silver, 150 metal, 100 potatoes, 2 or 3 small arms, 25 uranium, 10 medicine, and possibly a prisoner/slave.

Scrap collectors or butchers would come about every 65 days, and they would give the player an opportunity to buy meats, trade corpses for around 3 metal each, and trade debris for 1 scrap. They are basically a way to clear any excessive and unmanageable clutter a colony may have (unmanageable because the map size is currently limited).

When you press "Save page", you just go back to the main page, and no changes are actually saved. That's weird.

When I click on a window on a secondary monitor, it brings RimWorld away from focus, minimizing the game. There should be an option for keeping RimWorld on top of everything else so that that doesn't happen.

Also, there should be an option to play on a secondary monitor (if available).

EDIT: -adapter N (starting from 0) is a valid command line argument that starts the game on another monitor, although it still has the aforementioned issue.

I sometimes accidentally trap colonists in when I'm building rooms, and I don't realize it until the game tells me that they're hungry.

There should be a notice that informs the player when the AI pathfinder fails because the only possible path to fulfill a task is blocked.

In dialogs like colony naming and stockpile naming, the enter button doesn't actually close the dialog. This is more of a UX/accessibility thing, but it's just annoying when I have to take my hands off the keyboard and grab the mouse. (This sounds like I'm more lazy than I actually am.)

I'd also like the text box to be selected by default when the dialog comes up.

Because this community is getting larger and larger every day, we should begin taking security measures when working with mods that require assemblies (DLLs) as well.

Tynan hasn't restricted namespace usage yet, so that means that DLLs have unrestricted access, including the ability to plant bad stuff on your computer. Or if somebody writes really really bad code, it could hang Windows. (But that's not going to happen, so just consider it as a very exaggerated example.)

I think that source code (at least some, obfuscated or not) should be released along with mods. Not only does it help other modders in working on their own code, but it's also a good way to do a sort of peer review. The code doesn't have to be under an open license; it can be under a restrictive license (ex. no redistribution or commercial use is allowed).

Having to resort to tools like ILSpy is simply inconvenient. They are just for snooping around and curiosity, and it just gets in the way of learning. Yeah, I'm supposed to be writing tutorials, but I have to pull basic material from somewhere.

How would I make a door or gate that does a little animation when you try to open it? Like a door that swings around its hinge and doesn't slide when you open it.

I have had the worst time compiling anything GNU/Linux-related. GCC just randomly breaks, and I can't do ./configure + make on anything without it taking ages (more than 2 hours) to check if everything works and compiling the sources. And when it "finishes" it was actually due to a compiler error that occurred a couple dozen files ago! Also, autoconf tends to tell me that gcc can't create executables when it's just because it doesn't know what to make of a single little unrecognized argument.

Oh yeah, not to mention that all of these tools are completely out of the box. Why can't it just work...?

Links in the wiki are essentially indistinguishable from normal text. Can an admin/Tynan edit the CSS and give hyperlinks a bit of a shade of blue? That way, visitors can tell what's a link and what's not without having to hover over it. Thanks.

Also, if you could turn on VisualEditor, that would be awesome.

I'm just curious.

https://github.com/oldmud0/rwmd/wiki
I know I should put it in the official wiki. I'll do it later, but GitHub's Markdown editor is a lot simpler to use than the MediaWiki syntax.

Don't forget to pitch in; I can't do this without you guys! 

Tynan doesn't want people to come there, so I will try to keep it away from sight. I'll just say that the link above is mostly a personal repo for developing tutorials and pushing them to the official wiki.

In other words, when Rimworld is developed enough, do you think Curse will swallow the community? I hope not. I like small-ish communities, and I don't want the balance between people who are willing to contribute and people who just keep the game popular thrown off.

I myself am annoyed when my threads don't receive enough attention. That tends to happen a lot over there in the Minecraft forums.